I am a University Associate Professor in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. I received my PhD in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego in 2013 and was a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis before coming to Cambridge in 2014. My research focuses on nonhuman animal cognition, mechanistic explanation, and artificial intelligence.
I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Fellow of Selwyn College.
Research interests
General philosophy of science (experimentation, explanation, modeling, the new mechanistic philosophy), philosophy of psychology and cognitive science (comparative psychology, nonhuman animal cognition and communication, cognitive ethology, embodied and distributed cognition, neuroscience), philosophy of biology (mechanistic explanation and discovery, model organisms).
Selected publications
'Methods in Comparative Cognition' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023)
'Transitions in Cognitive Evolution' (with Andrew Barron and Colin Klein) Proceedings of the Royal Society (2023)
'Unlimited Associative Learning as a Null Hypothesis' Philosophy of Science (2022)
'Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment' (with Voudouris et al.) Frontiers in Psychology (2022)
'Replications in Comparative Psychology' Animal Behavior and Cognition (2021)
'Insightful Artificial Intelligence' Mind & Language, 1-15 (2021)
'Minds, Machines, and Molecules' (with T. D. P. Brunet). Philosophical Topics, 48(1) (2020)
'The Animal-AI Testbed and Competition' (with Crosby et al.) Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2019 Competition and Demonstration Track, PMLR 123: 164-176 (2020)
'Apply Rich Psychological Terms in AI with Care' (with Henry Shevlin). Nature Machine Intelligence, 1: 165-167 (2019)
'Not Null Enough: Pseudo-Null Hypotheses in Community Ecology and Comparative Psychology' (with William Bausman). Biology & Philosophy, 33(30): 1-20 (2018)
'The Goal of Ape Pointing' (with Katja Liebal and Michael Tomasello). PLOS ONE, 13(4):e0195182 (2018)
For a full list of publications, please see here.
